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Scroll down and select “Get Tickets” to receive a Zoom link to this virtual event. Buy Raising a Rare Girl at our independent bookstore, Ampersand Books.   Award-winning writer Heather Lanier’s memoir about raising a child with a rare syndrome, defying the tyranny of normal, and embracing parenthood as a spiritual practice that breaks us open in the best of ways.   “Lanier’s memoir is now on the short list of books I’ll give, when the time comes, to my…

Scroll down and select “Get Tickets” to receive a Zoom link to this virtual event.   Presented in partnership with the Livonia Public Library.   Joani Elliott’s humorous contemporary fiction debut, The Audacity of Sara Grayson (Post Hill Press), follows an insecure writer’s journey of self-discovery as she struggles to fill the void left behind by her mother, a best-selling literary icon. The Audacity of Sara Grayson is a rich tale—a story within a story—with dramatic twists at every turn.…

Scroll down and select “Get Tickets” to receive a Zoom link to this virtual event.   A debut collection from an extraordinary new talent, a vivid portrayal of the men and women of modern China and its diaspora. Cutting between clear-eyed realism and tongue-in-cheek magical realism, Chen’s stories coalesce into a portrait of a people striving for openings where mobility is limited.  With acute social insight, Chen layers years of experience reporting on the ground in China with incantatory prose…

Scroll down and select “Get Tickets” to receive a Zoom link to this virtual event.   Presented in partnership with the Livonia Public Library.   Masters of international intrigue Ed Fuller and Gary Grossman are back with their latest timely geopolitical thriller. When terrorists bomb bridges across the country and threaten the Hoover Dam, the vulnerability of America’s infrastructure becomes a matter of national security. With the U.S. at the mercy of an egomaniacal leader, and reporters and covert agents…

Scroll down and select “Get Tickets” to receive a Zoom link to this virtual event.   Despite her parents’ struggles with addiction, Lilly Dancyger always thought of her childhood as a happy one. But what happens when a journalist interrogates her own rosy memories to reveal the instability around the edges? Negative Space explores Dancyger’s anger, grief, and artistic inheritance as she sets out to illuminate the darkness that was hidden from her.   "This book is so many things:…

Scroll down and select “Get Tickets” to receive a Zoom link to this virtual event.   Photo by J. Adam Fenster, University of Rochester Joanna Scott turns her “incandescent imagination” (Publishers Weekly) back to the craft of the short story, with breathtaking results. Ranging across history from the distant past to the future, Scott tours the many forms our stories can take, from cave wall paintings to radio banter to digitized archives, and the far-reaching consequences of our communications.  …

Scroll down and select “Get Tickets” to receive a Zoom link to this virtual event.   Buy Strike the Hammer at our independent bookstore, Ampersand Books.   On July 24, 1964, chaos erupted in Rochester, NY. Strike the Hammer examines the unrest—rebellion by the city's Black community, rampant police brutality—that would radically change the trajectory of the Civil Rights movement. Laura Warren Hill examines Rochester's long Civil Rights history and, drawing extensively on oral accounts of the northern, urban community,…

Scroll down and select “Get Tickets” to receive a Zoom link to this virtual event.   The Renunciations is a book of resilience, survival, and the journey to radically shift one’s sense of self in the face of trauma. Moving between a childhood marked by love and abuse and the breaking marriage of that adult child, Donika Kelly charts memory and the body as landscapes to be traversed and tended.   “A lionhearted odyssey through the self, a casting aside…

Scroll down and select “Get Tickets” to receive a Zoom link to this virtual event.   Presented in partnership with the Livonia Public Library.   In a memoir filled with human drama, wisdom and timeless life lessons, On the Road Less Traveled: An Unlikely Journey from the Orphanage to the Boardroom tells the improbable story of how Hajim bounced from foster homes to orphanages in a daily struggle to survive, to living the American dream as an accomplished Wall Street…

Scroll down and select “Get Tickets” to receive a Zoom link to this virtual event.   A “dazzling” (Bryan Washington, author of Memorial) and brilliantly satirical debut novel about two best friends—a disgraced influencer and a struggling actor—who form The Atmosphere, a cult designed to reform problematic men.   Sasha Marcus was once the epitome of contemporary success: an internet sensation, social media darling, and a creator of a high profile wellness brand for women. But a confrontation with an…

Scroll down and select “Get Tickets” to receive a Zoom link to this virtual event.   Buy All the Morning Crows at our independent bookstore, Ampersand Books.   “Untranslatable and mysterious as any mythology, a various history of a changeable self accumulates in these inventive, charged, and often ecstatic poems.”--Cleopatra Mathis   Meg Kearney will be in conversation with Steve Huff, author of A Fire in the Hill.   Meg Kearney’s most recent poetry collection, All Morning the Crows, is…

Scroll down and select “Get Tickets” to receive a Zoom link to this virtual event.   Presented in partnership with the Livonia Public Library.   The 1960s transformed America.  After World War II, Korea, and the dreams of a healing nation, the ‘60s shook America to its foundation—the assassination of an idealistic young president, a tragic and unpopular war, the battle for civil rights, a cosmic clash of riots and burning cities, and an explosion of sex, drugs and rock…

Scroll down and select “Get Tickets” to receive a Zoom link to this virtual event.   In her fiercely beautiful memoir, Jeannine Ouellette recollects fragments of her life and arranges them elliptically to witness each piece as torn and whole, as something more than itself. Caught between the dramatic landscapes of Lake Superior and Casper Mountain, between her stepfather’s groping and her mother’s erratic behavior, she lives for the day she can become a mother, herself, and create her own…

Scroll down and select “Get Tickets” to receive a Zoom link to this virtual event. In this intimate collection, award-winning poet Cheryl Boyce-Taylor pays tribute to her departed son Malik ‘Phife Dawg’ Taylor of the legendary hip-hop trio A Tribe Called Quest.   Mama Phife Represents is a hybrid-story that follows the journey of a mother’s grieving heart through her first two years of public and private mourning. Told through a tapestry of narrative poems, dreams, anecdotes, journal entries, and…

Scroll down and select “Get Tickets” to receive a Zoom link to this virtual event.   A heady, inventive, fantastical novel about the nature of memory and the difficulty of confronting trauma. Harrowing, meticulous, and deranged, Subdivision is a brilliant maze of a novel from the writer Kelly Link has called "a master of the dark arts." With the narrative intensity and mordant humor familiar to readers of Broken River, J. Robert Lennon continues his exploration of the mysteries of…

Scroll down and select “Get Tickets” to receive a Zoom link to this virtual event.   Presented in partnership with the Livonia Public Library.   After years of grappling with an eating disorder and trauma from her early childhood, Sadhvi Saraswati  felt as if she was successfully navigating her way through early adulthood. When she agreed to travel to India to appease her husband, Sadhvi never imagined that she would be embarking on a journey of healing and awakening. Hollywood…

Scroll down and select “Get Tickets” to receive a Zoom link to this virtual event.   When Danielle Geller’s mother dies of alcohol withdrawal during an attempt to get sober, Geller returns to Florida and finds her mother’s life packed into eight suitcases. Most are filled with clothes, except for the last one, which contains diaries, photos, and letters, a few undeveloped disposable cameras, dried sage, jewelry, and the bandana her mother wore on days she skipped a hair wash. …

Scroll down and select “Get Tickets” to receive a Zoom link to this virtual event.   Bodies Unbound is a well-researched narrative about the relationship between bodies and gender. Drawing on the experiences of individuals whose bodies and gender identities don’t match medical and social expectations, the author explores how ideologies of gendered bodies shape medical care.   “Sledge’s fieldwork has led to a rich and vibrant analysis of how gender is enacted, resisted, performed, and policed in medical settings.…